“The Humanity Which Ever Influences His Royal Highness”: Antislavery Foreign, Military, and Colonial Policy in the Atlantic World

In 1813, a “Most Secret” government document laying out to British commanders the war policy towards the US in the coming campaign emphasized “the Humanity which ever influences His Royal Highness.” That humanity, this document urged, must comprise emancipating enslaved Americans but not encouraging insurrection among them. But that humanity would not encompass enslaved people in the British West Indies until 1833. This paper will explore how this is indicative of a pattern of British military, diplomatic, and colonial officials getting ahead (in an antislavery direction) of official policy in Whitehall. That began with Lord Dunmore improvising antislavery on the ground in Virginia in 1775, and moved through the War of 1812 and other key moments before 1833.

This was not some concerted or even consistent pattern, instead being situational. This made it similar to other nations’ officials who similarly forged ahead of domestic restraint in formulating antislavery foreign / military / imperial policies. This paper connects, for instance, to what Ada Ferrer’s 2013 AHR article reveals about Alexandre Petion acting in a more decisively antislavery way in a case of Black refugees to his republic from Jamaica than he did in terms of domestic plantation policies. Another parallel is Leger-Felicite Sonthonax far exceeding his original remit as a French Revolutionary commissioner in St. Domingue as he formulated general emancipation in 1793. And another is American Governor William Hull in Detroit in 1807, who proved eager to receive Black freedom seekers from Upper Canada and embody them in a militia, in a way that went well past the rather more complicated overall US policy towards slavery. The paper would ultimately analyze why so many actors in the Atlantic world acted more decisively against slavery in these foreign policy realms than their counterparts did in these empires’ respective domestic spheres.